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This special issue examines the resurgence of far-right groups, considering how recent events in Charlottesville can illuminate radical movements in Europe. It focuses on three key elements: nationalism, nativism, and the revolt against globalization. Nationalism was the word most associated with the Charlottesville rally, whose participants often called themselves “white nationalists.” By this, they meant that a racialized national identity should be the condition for political belonging.

In this special anniversary edition of EuropeNow, curators Peter Haslinger and Nicole Shea highlight the importance in research and culture of smaller central and eastern European regions. The research presented here assesses the concepts, paradigms, and methods for the re-evaluation of multi-ethnicity, diversity, and mobility in a globalized and “post-factual” era, and seeks to identify factors and agencies that help to explain the current trends towards the obsession with security agendas.

The inescapable politics of knowledge production about and for a Europe in crisis demands scholarly transparency. In this issue, we consider the value and limits of their disciplinary perspectives in explaining the recent crises of European Integration. We nail our colors to the mast by arguing that a political economy approach is valuable – and ought to be cherished – for seeing more than just economics vs. politics at play in explaining crisis and navigating Europe’s future.

We have seen two opposing trends across Europe: On the one hand, civil society has demonstrated a great degree of compassion with the plight of refugees, organizing local welcome committees and, in the Canadian case, even putting pressure on the government to accept more refugees from Syria as a fundamental humanitarian commitment of the country. On the other hand, the populist Right has exploited the influx of so many refugees for their political mobilization.

In Europe, from the time of religious pilgrimages or journeys to spa towns for thermal treatments, all sorts of people have undertaken recreational travel since at least the Middle-Ages, even if motivations differed. But, it is with the industrial revolution that tourism took on a new face with the practice of the tour. Later, the emergence of paid leave in many places gave the impetus for the first mass tourists.

Given the severity of challenges facing Europe, from Brexit and the Trump administration’s thinly veiled hostility to the EU and NATO, to the on-going influx of refugees and the rise of populism, writing about gender and sexuality might seem quaint, even indulgent to some people. They would be mistaken. Any thorough examination of the political, social, and economic situation of Europe in the early twenty-first century takes gender and sexuality seriously.

In this challenging time of governmental retrenchment—with its accompanying cuts to the Arts and Humanities—many foundations have been stepping up and pivoting their missions to a defense of democratic values and shared cultural heritages. At the same time, institutions of higher learning, think tanks, artists, policy makers, and NGOs have been reimagining their mission and innovating new models of collaboration not only among like-minded institutions, but across disciplines and national boundaries.

Our global dependence on fossil fuels, nuclear power, intense resource extraction economies, genetic manipulations, air, soil, and water contamination, and byproducts of modernity such as waste material like plastics and other synthetic polymers have caused great disturbances in the Earth ecosystems on which many species depend, including the human species.

In this issue, we have invited research, artistic explorations, and campus initiatives to look at how different entities are dealing with the problem that eyewitnesses are dying and that memory starts to move from social memory into cultural memory.

This month’s special feature investigates how language, lyrics, poetics, and politics speak to and push against each other in a politically charged climate, which to many Europeans echoes eerily of a not-too-distant past

In political analysis, scientific inquiry, literature, poetry, language, and the arts, we examine the loss of culture and identity and the effects of trauma on the human mind, as well as the healing power of artistic expression.

Contributors to this special feature address theoretical and empirical aspects of some of the key transformations: massification of higher education, reforming academic careers, and increased focus on international collaboration and productivity in research.

The essays presented in this special feature address the growing public and political concern over increasing levels of social stratification and reveal the political relevance of health inequalities across Europe. Specifically, we asked health inequality experts to reflect on some of the biggest challenges surrounding health inequalities in different European countries.